Sharing Life's Lessons on Living in this World and yet being Above it!

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Friday, April 4, 2014

Nothing’s worth losing sleep over

At times when nothing works, a good sleep works best!

This past week, a challenge that I am faced
with, has had me working overtime with our lawyers. It involves a lot of
paperwork and preparing a case. Often times, I have woken up in the wee hours
to deal with it. So, in a sense, I have been short on the hours of sleep that I
normally get. The apartment above ours is going through a complete renovation.
All day the workers are knocking away at the floor, ostensibly to remove all
the tiles in an effort to re-lay them. The noise from the floor above is
deafening and allows no room for even a few minutes of rest and repair during
the day. Overall, it has been a very demanding week. That’s when I got a window
today – around mid-morning, having completed
all the documentation I had to on the legal front, to take a break. But the
workers were pounding away above me. I wanted to somehow just catch up on my
sleep. I decided to shut out the noise by reminding my mind that I did not hear
it (a principle I have mastered through the practice of “mouna” – daily silence periods). In a few minutes of continuously directing
my mind, the noise levels became irrelevant. And I fell asleep. I slept for a
good four hours, soundly, uninterrupted, and woke up recharged and refreshed.

Nothing works like sleep. Nothing quite
rejuvenates the way it does. Nothing fills your soul with confidence and
conviction more than a few hours of sleep!

I have often found that the first casualty of
any Life challenge is sleep. Sometimes, the lack of sleep in your Life is not
just because of work pressure. But because you are worried, anxious and are
despairing over a situation that you are clueless about. Your mind will kid you
in such circumstances to stay up without sleep in the hope that you can find a
solution to whatever vexes you. Staying up for a few nights to finish
assignments and meet deadlines is fine. But inability to sleep because of worry
is a no-no. It simply doesn’t help. Sleep deprivation in fact compounds
matters. It makes you weak and fatigued. How can you address your Life
challenge when, at a physical level, you remain exhausted and spent? So, the
golden rule of intelligent living is to not let anything come between you and
your sleep cycle.

If for a few days your sleep is interrupted owing
to travel or work pressure or a crisis you have to deal with, restore your
usual sleep pattern at the earliest opportunity. Ideally, set your worries
aside as you put head to pillow. People tell me that this is difficult. I do
agree. Initially, even when you close your eyes, your mind is hyper-active and
is going bang-bang-bang throwing up all your worries and playing up all your
fears and insecurities. But the clothes peg approach works great here. Imagine
you have a clothes peg next to your bed. Before you sleep, you will probably
remove your day clothes and hang them on the clothes peg. You will then wear
your night clothes and hit the bed. Do the same with your worries. Hang them on
an imaginary peg. Don’t worry about your worries – they will go nowhere. When
you wake up in the morning, you can take them back. Train your mind, with
consistent practice of the clothes peg approach over a few days, and be sure, you
will begin to sleep well. Very well.

Good sleep cannot solve your problems. Nor does
worrying! But sleep helps – where worrying can never help – in recharging all
your batteries so that you can face Life and take on your problems with renewed
vigor and enthusiasm. Ernest Hemingway (1899~1961), the legendary American
author, champions good sleep thus: “I love sleep. My Life has the tendency to
fall apart when I’m awake, you see?” The big moral here: It’s
not worth losing your sleep over anything!